This section introduces aspects that may be helpful in facilitating a better understanding of the invention. Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is in the prior art or what is not in the prior art.
The explosive growth in the transmission of video over wireless networks has in many cases had an adverse impact on subscriber experience. Conventional approaches to controlling delivery of video over wireless networks include adaptive streaming techniques in which a video server attempts to match the rate at which video is delivered to a given user device to the available bandwidth sensed by an application running on that device.
Using this localized per-device optimization approach, each user device application will generally attempt to maximize its own individual throughput without regard to the impact it may have on other applications running on other user devices and receiving video over the same wireless network. From the perspective of the wireless network service provider, “low value” applications which require high bandwidth may compete on shared wireless network channels with “high value” applications that require less bandwidth. This can lead to a significant degradation in performance for the high value applications, and a corresponding loss in revenue for the wireless network service provider.